The Collected Letters, Volume 31

Dear Brother,—I know not if you have much personal or other acquaintance with Saffi; but he seems very desirous to have your testimony,—and
incloses this Letter to Jane, requesting me to plead with you for him.1 I can only say you will be very safe in testifying anything you do know about him,—how (in conversation if not otherwise)
you have found him well-informed abt &c &c.2 I understand he has a good chance for this place (£150 a-year);3 indeed I know not that there is any real competition.

We had the same wild wind-storm that visited you, on the same night; but it did not hurt us here, beyond howling and whewing
about the chimney tops all night, if that could be called hurt.— Poor Alick's Letter pleased me much, and was very affecting
in the humour I was in.

Nothing can exceed the “mildness” (a too often very glarry heat) of the season just now: green buds all appearing on our lilac bushes, nay today I could actually have plucked you a
kind of leaf from one. In great haste (for it is still forenoon), Yours ever T. Carlyle

1. Count Aurelio Saffi had also written to JWC, 1 Jan., when he and Alexander Scott regretted that she and TC were away; he was in London “two or three weeks more” and had been
“yesterday morning to breakfast with [F. D. Maurice] and the Misses Sterling at Queen Square.”

2. In John's capacity as an Italianist and trans. of Dante's Inferno (1849).

3. The post is unidentified; he had been lecturing in Oxford since 1853.